Hidden Brains Insights

Google places strong emphasis on optimum performance and speed. Two years back, the search engine giant launched Zopfli, a compression algorithm. The IT industry was quick to embrace the compression algorithm. Zopfli was extremely efficient in different areas, right from web content preprocessing to PNG optimizers.

Based on the overwhelming success of Zopfli, Google announced a new compression algorithm, Brotli last year. Named after a Swiss bakery product, Brotli is an open source data compression algorithm.

Brotli uses a combination of a modern variant of the LZ77 algorithm, Huffman coding and 2nd order context modeling, with a compression ratio comparable to the best currently available general-purpose compression methods. The Mountain View-based company expects Brotli to outclass Zopfli by 20 to 26 percent.

According to Google’s Zoltan Szabadka, Software Engineer from the Compression Team, “Brotli is roughly as fast as zlib’s Deflate implementation. At the same time, it compresses slightly more densely than LZMA and bzip2 on the Canterbury corpus. The higher data density is achieved by a 2nd order context modeling, re-use of entropy codes, larger memory window of past data and joint distribution codes.”

The search giant is now all set to roll out its latest algorithm, “Brotli,” onto the Chrome browser. According to Google team, Chrome users can expect to view a significant increase in speed once the new version of Chrome is released.

Brotli will help mobile Chrome users experience "lower data transfer fees and reduced battery use." The company is banking on Brotli as "a new data format." Google hopes that Brotli will be adopted by several web browsers in the near future. Firefox seems to be the most likely contender to embrace Brotli.

As of now, Chrome users can expect faster loading of web pages in the coming weeks.